Saturday, February 6, 2016

Jesus Meets Muhammad on Issues of Religion and Politics

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., February 6, 2016

Can
Jesus and Muhammad meet today and reconcile their differences on religion and
politics? It depends on how Christians
and Muslims understand the teachings of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad on God’s
standards of legitimacy (what is right).
In the ancient scriptures, Moses and Muhammad emphasized God’s laws,
while Jesus emphasized God’s love over
law.

There
are many variations of Christianity.
Jerry Falwell, Jr. is an evangelical Christian who is President of
Liberty University, the largest Christian University in the world. He endorsed Donald Trump to be President of
the U.S. and referred to him as an exemplar of the greatest commandment to love God and our neighbors as
ourselves. By Falwell’s fundamentalist standards of Christianity, moderate and
progressive Christians are heretics.

There
are similar differences within Islam.
Polling data provided by the Pew Research Center indicates that most
Muslims are fundamentalists who believe that Muhammad dictated the Qur’an as
the perfect and immutable word of God. Most
Christians believe that Jesus taught and exemplified the word of God, but they are
not fundamentalists who consider the Bible to be the inerrant and infallible
word of God. Few Christians believe that
the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel accounts are a verbatim account of his teachings.

Islamic
scholars have asserted that the greatest
commandment is a common word of
faith for Christians and Muslims alike. But
how to relate the moral imperative to love our neighbors--including our unbelieving neighbors--to our politics has
proven to be problematic. Most Islamic
scholars reject libertarian concepts of democracy and human rights since they
conflict with the dictates of the Qur’an and Islamic law (Shari’a) that includes
apostasy and blasphemy laws that prevent any freedom of religion and
speech. This represents a basic conflict
of religious and political values that impedes better interfaith relations, and
is a theme of Islamist terrorists.

Such
a toxic mix of religion and politics is not limited to Islam. The current political season in the U.S. has
produced GOP politicians like Trump who claim that God is on their side as they
seek the support of fundamentalist evangelical Christians. It is nothing new. Christianity and political power have had an
incestuous relationship ever since Constantine made Christianity the official
religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century; and even though
Jesus avoided mixing the power of God’s kingdom with that of worldly kingdoms,
the Church has done just that. Jerry
Falwell’s Moral Majority in the 1980s and his son’s endorsement of Donald Trump
this year are only the most recent examples of Christianity mixing religion with
politics.

Islam
has been more consistent than Christianity in imposing the divine mandates of religion
on its politics, blurring any distinction between the two. Unlike Western democracies, Islamic cultures
were not transformed by the libertarian concepts of the Enlightenment. Even following the political upheavals of the
Arab Spring of 2011, libertarian democracy, human rights and the secular rule
of law are largely absent in Islamic cultures.
Shari’a continues to stifle fundamental freedoms with apostasy and
blasphemy laws, and has sanctified authoritarian regimes like that of President
(and former General) El-Sissi in Egypt.

El-Sissi
has used religion to suppress political dissent and incarcerate opponents of
his authoritarian regime. And the bitter
and vociferous dispute between two prominent Islamic clerics, Sheikh Ali Gomaa and
Dr. Qaradawi, the former supporting El-Sissi and the latter opposing him, is
testimony to the pervasive and corrosive role of religion and politics in Egypt, the bellwether of Sunni Islam. Saudi Arabia is another ally of the
U.S. in the Middle East that makes no pretense of democracy, human rights or the
secular rule of law as it exports its version of fundamentalist Islam (Wahhabism)
worldwide.

How
do we define Jesus and Muhammad in today’s world—or more appropriately, how do
we define the many and diverse variations of Islam and Christianity that have
developed around their teachings—in order to reconcile the religious
differences that have created so much hate and violence? Secretary of State John Kerry has called the
Islamists of ISIS apostates, using
their own terminology to condemn them, but that is not helpful since Kerry is
not a Muslim and has no standing to define true Islam. The same can be said of those Islamists who
condemn Christians in the U.S. as minions of the Great Satan.

We
cannot define either Jesus or Muhammad today in a way acceptable to all
Christians and Muslims, but if the
greatest commandment is truly a
common word of faith then we can define what it means to love our neighbors
as ourselves—including our unbelieving
neighbors—as a common religious and political value and learn to practice what
we preach. That’s a big order, and there
is little evidence that religious leaders are willing to do that; but it’s the
only way that Jesus and Muhammad can meet today and reconcile contentious
differences in religion and politics. If
religious leaders were committed to that kind of reconciliation, they could
transform religion and politics as we know them and make the world a better
place.

Notes
and References to Resources:

Previous blogs on related topics
are: Faith and Freedom, December 15,
2014; The Greatest Commandment,
January 11, 2015; Love over Law: A
Principle at the Heart of Legitimacy, January 18, 2015; Jesus Meets Muhammad: Is There a Common Word
of Faith for Jews, Christians and Muslims Today?, January 25, 2015; Religion and Human Rights, February 22,
2015; God and Country: Resolving
Conflicting Concepts of Sovereignty, March 29, 2015; Religion, Human Rights and National Security, May 10, 2015; Christians Meet Muslims Today, June 21,
2015; Fear and Fundamentalism, July
26, 2015; Politics and Religious
Polarization, September 20, 2015; The
Muslim Stranger: A Good Neighbor or a Threat?, October 25, 2015; Faith, Hope and Love in a World of Fear,
Suspicion and Hate, December 5, 2015; Who
Is My Neighbor?, January 23, 2016; and The
Politics of Loving Our Neighbors as Ourselves, January 30, 2016..

Sheikh
Gomaa has an unlikely ally in Senator Ted Cruz, who has praised al-Sissi as“…a tough, terror-fighting commander
who should both be befriended and emulated. Here's Cruz, from the Post's
annotated transcript of the whole debate. ‘... let me contrast President
Obama, who at the prayer breakfast, essentially acted as an apologist. He said,
"Well, gosh, the crusades, the inquisitions —" We need a
president that shows the courage that Egypt's President al-Sissi, a Muslim,
when he called out the radical Islamic terrorists who are threatening the
world. Sissi, you see, is no sissy. The Egyptian president came to power
in 2013 through a coup that ousted the country's first democratically-elected
leader — Mohammed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sissi's takeover was
spurred in part by rising anti-Morsi sentiment and mass protests and saw only
muted condemnation from a few circles in Washington.” Seehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/07/gop-debate-highlights-republicans-obsession-with-egypts-sissi/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1